5/8 How To Create A Website For Your Podcast | Start A Podcast Fast

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Having a website for your podcast allows you to build an asset and make money from your podcast much easier than if you just had a podcast hosted on SoundCloud.

In this lesson you’re going to learn how to create a website for your podcast. Every podcast that I have has a website associated with it and I believe this is essential if you want to build a business around your podcast.

I’m going to explain why I recommend this.

Why You Need A Website To Successfully Run A Podcast

1. A Website Gives You Full Control Of Your Podcast

The first reason I recommend having your own website is that it gives you full control of your podcast.

It’s much easier to rearrange the order of your podcast. You can get SEO benefits by using your own website which will help you rank higher in iTunes

and it just means that if SoundCloud goes away tomorrow or you media host goes away tomorrow you can switch over to someone else and there’s going to be no issues with your podcast at all. Your listeners won’t even know and you can continue to build your audience.

2. A Website Becomes An Asset You Can Make Money From

The second reason and the main reason I recommend that you use your own website is that you can actually build an asset that you can make money from. You can control it and you could potentially sell that down the track.

A website is a place where you can collect email addresses by giving away freebies and you can market to these people over and over again.

You can create and sell products on your website which is something you definitely can’t do on SoundCloud.

You can get Google traffic as well as iTunes and SoundCloud traffic by getting transcriptions of your podcasts and putting them on your website and you can turn web browsers into podcast listeners. People therefore come to your website, they see your stuff because they’re reading it, they realize you have a podcast and they start listening so it’s a great way to build your audience. Getting more listeners allows you to maximize your revenue.

If you want to learn more about making money from your podcast and building an asset using your website then go to www.podcastfast.com/money to get our free tutorial on the best way to make money from your podcast.

How To Create A Website For Your Podcast: Step-by-Step

Step #1: Buy A Domain Name

The first step in setting up your website is actually buying a domain name. So this is your www.yourdomain.com. For me, it’s podcastfast.com.

This is going to cost you $10 a year in order to own this domain.

I recommend you purchase your domain from Go Daddy. You can get there by going through my affiliate link at www.podfast.com/godaddy.

Finding a domain name using Go Daddy is really easy.

In the search bar, simply type in the domain name that you want. For example “podcastfast” and then click search domain.

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We can see that unfortunately podcastfast.com is taken and that’s because I already own it.

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However, we can see suggestions of different names that we could call ourselves, like podcastquick.com, and there are lots of other suggestions down there or we can simply search again.

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So in this case let’s search podcast and we can see that that’s not available at all so you basically just keep searching until you find one that you’re happy with it. Let’s say I type in “podcasting for you”. Yes we can see that that is available.

You can also search for domains if you click the domains tab. You can click this bulk domain search

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and you can search from multiple domains at once using this

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But “podcasting for you” is available so I’m going to click continue to cart.

Go Daddy will now try and upsell you so I just want to let you know you don’t need any of these upsell so just click continue to cart and don’t select any of them.

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Here we are at our cart and I suggest that you change this term from two years to one year and you can see that this is $9.91 Australian so it’s probably even going to be cheaper in US dollars, and you click proceed to checkout.

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So that is how you buy a domain name for your podcast.

Step #2: Step Up Hosting

The next thing we want to do is actually set up a website for our podcast so when people go to our domain name there is actually a website name there.

In order to do that, we need hosting.

What is hosting?

When you visit a website what is actually happening is your computer is downloading that website from someone else’s computer and hosting is a fancy way of saying that you’re putting your website on someone else’s computer or you’re putting on servers which are like really big rocks of computers.

You can do this yourself; however, it’s painful and expensive. It’s much cheaper just to use a host and I’m going to show you a very affordable host right now.

My Recommended Website Host

I recommend end use Arvixe they are a great host, they have great support, and great uptime. I haven’t had any issues with them. You can check them out by going to www.podcastfast.com/hosting and if you use the coupon code “podcastfast” all one word then you will get 20% off your first Invoice.

I will be using Auvixe in this demonstration so if you decide to go with another host then some of the things in this tutorial may be a little bit different.

The cost of hosting is going to cost you $5.60 up front plus $7 dollars per month or if you pay for two years up front it cost you $76.80 using the coupon code “podcastfast” and that works out to about $3.60 per month. Therefore as you can see it is extremely affordable.

To get setup with Auvixe simply go through my affiliate link at www.podcast.com/hosting and that will bring you to this page where you can click on the big view plans button in green.

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You can then choose between personal class and personal class pro. The only difference is the number of websites that you can actually have on your server. Therefore for the cheaper one – personal class, you can only have six and for personal cost pro it’s unlimited and the price obviously is different.

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We will just go ahead and click order now and we then want to make sure that we put in our coupon code so we put in podcastfast (all one word, all lower case) and we click use and we can see that that has given us a discount of $19.20.

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You can change this from a two year period by hovering over the price in clicking the edit button and then adjusting the period.

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However I do recommend two years because it works out to be $3.60 per month instead of $7.00 per month.

You then fill out your details and click the next button.

On the next page we now select the third option which is neither. We will neither register nor transfer a domain name. That’s because we bought and we’re keeping our domain name with Go Daddy which is the most recommended supplier.

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We then put in our domain name, so for me it’s podcastfast.com. We then skip over all these add-ons, we don’t need those and we click next.

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We can then review our order and we can click place this order and then finally you can go ahead and you can make payment with Pay Pal, Google Wallet and they have a whole bunch of other options as well.

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Once you are set up you receive this hosting account information email from Auvixe Now you need to keep this email, it’s very important that you keep this. We will need the domain name DNS information and the control panel information.

Step #3: Change Your ‘Nameservers’

The next step is to change your name servers. If you don’t understand what that means don’t worry.

basically the name servers are what tell someone’s computer if they type in your domain name, it tells where your website is actually located.

To do that, we go back to godaddy.com and we click the sign in button in the top right hand corner and sign in.

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Once we’re signed in we then want to find this domain section and click launch.

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We then want to find our domain. I’ve got a lot of domains as you can see. Chances are you’ll only have one, but find your domain and to the right of it you can see this little arrow, if you click on that, it’ll open a drop down menu and you need to click “set name servers”.

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These name servers will be set to standard so you need to actually change this to custom and you then want to click this “enter custom name servers button”.

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Remember that email that I said don’t lose from Auvixe? We’re going to need that now.
If we go to the domain DNS information, what we’re looking at is the domain name server 1 and domain name server 2. That’s all we’ll need. Let’s copy domain name server 1 and we then need to paste that in as our first name server.

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We go back into our email and we copy domain name server 2 and we then paste that in as the second one.

We then click the OK button and we click the Save button.

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We can now see that our request has been submitted changes may take a few moments to take effect. By a few moments they mean 12 to 48 hours. It can take up to two days for those name servers to change and to point to your website. That is therefore something to keep in mind.

Step #4: Set Up Your Website Using WordPress

Word Press is a super easy to use platform for managing web sites, blogs, podcasts and everything like that. It’s the one that I use for every website. In fact about a third of the entire internet is set up on Word Press so it’s highly stable, highly recommended, millions of people use it.

Let’s go back into our email and that email from Auvixe and we want to find this section Control Panel Information and we want to find this alternate address and for me it’s [inaudible 9:02 @auvixe.com/cpanel.] Yours may be slightly different. Let’s click on that and open that up.

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We can then log in using the login details we choose when we signed up and we can find our user name here, right under the alternate address. It will then bring us to this page which is our control panel and this is the very back end of your website.

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Setting up your website on WordPress is super easy. Simply scroll down until you see the script section or the softaculous apps installer and we want to click on Word Press.

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Simply click the blue Install button

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you then choose the right domain. In this case it would be podcastfast.com.

Where it said in directory, you want that to be clear so that way you will install on podcastfast.com, not podcastfast.com/wp.

For a database name you want to make this something that is memorable so you know that its associated with your website so I might just put PF which stands for Podcast Fast.

Leave the table prefix

we can put in our site details, so for me I’ll put podcastfast and for my subtitle I put Don’t Just PodCast.

For the admin user name, change this from admin. If you leave this as admin that will open you up to hacks a lot easier so I’ll just change this to Ryan.

And then simply enter what you want your password to be

and then also put in your email address. For me, that’s ryan@podcastfast.com

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If you want to learn how to create your own email address like Ryan at ryan@podcastfast.com or you at yourdomain.com then I’ve got a tutorial showing you how to do that. Go to www.podcastfast.com/email to get that tutorial.

We then skip over everything else.

We also skip over the themes which are what the look of what our website is. I do have a tutorial showing you how to make your website look awesome. If you want to check that out go to www.podcastfast.com/awesome.

We then enter our email address so we can get our installation details and we click the Install button.

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It’s now installing and the installation is complete. It is that easy.

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Step #5: Add Blubrry Powerpress Plugin

The next step is to install the blubrry pal press plugin which gives podcasting functionality to your website.

Let me show you how to do this.

We need to log into our website using the word press back end. In order to do that simply go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. For me that’s podcastfast.com/wp-admin. We can now log in.

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Now you’re in the back end of your website. If all of this looks a bit confusing for you then please don’t be scared there is a bit of a learning curve with using Word Press but once you get used to it is very easy to use.

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If you need to learn how to use the basics of WordPress then you can get my free WordPress basics tutorial by going to www.podcastfast.com/wordpress. I walk you step-by-step through the basics in that video.

but I’m also going to show you a little bit about WordPress in the coming lesson when I show you how to post your podcast episodes.

However, for now we need to add the blubrry PowerPress plugin and in order to do that on the left hand side we need to find this plugin section and we need to go down to add new.

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We can see a whole bunch of different plugins that we can add but in the top right we want to click on the search bar and we want to type Blubrry

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and the first one to come out should be this Blubrry PowerPress podcasting plugin, hit the Install Now button

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and then confirm it.

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It will then install and we click the Activate plugin button.

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The Blubrry PowerPress plugin is now activated. There are some extra settings that you do need to go through to set this up correctly so you can submit it to iTunes.

However I will be showing you exactly how to do that step by step in an upcoming lesson: How To Set Up The Blubrry PowerPress Plugin Correctly.

However, before you can set up the Blurry PowerPress plugin you do need to publish your very first podcast episode, so that is going to be the topic of the next lesson.

That completes this lesson: How To Create A Website For Your Podcast. By now you should have purchased a domain name, you should have purchased hosting and you should have created your website using the instructions that I shared with you.

I’m looking forward to showing you how to publish podcast episodes using WordPress in the next lesson.